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So, come find us!

We’ll be in Booth 577 in the Expo Hall. Andy, Tammy and I will be holding down the fort there.

If you’re looking for something to do on Tuesday night, join us at the Magnolia Hotel from 5:30 to 7:30pm. We are hosting a birds of a feather gathering with Float Mobile Learning. If you want to come chat measurement and mobile with us, you can find more info and RSVP here.

Tin Can API sessions and panels

Tin Can Case Studies for a Brave New World – M111
Mon, May 20 | 12:30 pm – 1:45 pm
Megan Bowe

Everything You Need to Know About the Experience API (“Tin Can”) – M305
Mon, May 20 | 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm
Megan Bowe, Julie Dirksen, Jason Haag, Clark Quinn, Aaron Silvers

Designing Beyond SCORM: What Is the Tin Can API? – TU101
Tue, May 21 | 10:00 am – 11:00 am
Tim Martin

As you can see, ASTD ICE is going to be full of Tin Can goodness. We hope to see a bunch of you there!

The post Come Find Us at ASTD ICE 2013, Booth 577 appeared first on Tin Can API.

Some people learn better from live interaction than from reading a webpage or a white paper — that’s one reason that we like webinars. We have these two coming up:

• May 21st, Noon-1pm, CDT. Mike will be joining some of the top “Tin Canners” on a panel hosted by the Brandon Hall Group. They’ll be talking about why Tin Can exists, how it’s different from older standards, the current evolution of Tin Can, who is using it and how, and the future of Tin Can. You can register for this webinar here.
• June 11th, 1:00p-2:00pm, CDT. Mike will be presenting “Rethinking Learning Systems with the Tin Can API”. Join in and learn about Learning Record Stores, Training Delivery Systems (that’s a new one), the role of the LMS in a Tin Can world, and a lot more. You can register for this webinar here.

Come and join in if you can, and if you can’t, we’ll be posting the recordings, slides, and the answers to your questions just like we always do.

The post Two for the Show appeared first on Tin Can API.

Need an LRS? SCORM Cloud is ready.
Need to make statements? Our Javascript open source library is updated to 1.0.
Would you rather use the statement generator? Go right ahead!
Want to play with prototypes? Tetris, golf, and the museum tour are ready. So is the public sandbox.

Game on.

The post Use the 1.0.0 spec right now, literally. appeared first on Tin Can API.

It was almost three years ago when ADL asked the e-learning community to help them with research to create a new, simpler, more powerful e-learning standard. E-learning standards are what we do, so of course we jumped at the opportunity.

The result was Project Tin Can, which resulted in the Tin Can API. We wrote the first version of the API, version 0.8, then handed it over to ADL and a vibrant open community.

Today it looks like a few guys in Nashville, TN (and a few stragglers up North) managed to transform our slice of the world.

Learning isn’t going to be tracked the same way that it has been. You want to know more about learners than just “someone completed a course” or “someone scored 98% on an test”. You want to be able to track activities that take place outside of an LMS, like serious games, mobile apps, group projects, conferences, simulations and so much more. You want to be able to correlate real-world performance with training data. And, you want all of this learning and performance data to live in one system.

The Tin Can API makes all of this a reality.

Already about 60 products/companies have adopted beta versions of the spec. Now is the time when the rest of the industry joins in.

The post The World Just Changed appeared first on Tin Can API.

Q: I love the concept, and would like to break out of the LMS confines and track other external content, but not sure how/where to start

We hear this question a lot. There is so much that Tin Can offers, implementing all of the possibilities is a daunting task. Fortunately it’s easy to start small. In every organization we’ve worked with, it has been easy to identify 3-6 pilot projects that are small in scope, but provide a big impact and lots of visibility. Take on a mobile learning project, or incorporate a game into your training program. Find an area where you can easily measure business performance and correlate training data with improved performance. Consolidate data from several LMS’s into a LRS, or use a TDS to deliver training from anywhere. Feel free to give us a call, we’re happy to help brainstorm the possibilities.

Q: With the looming explosion – where do you recommend a org focus to prep for it?

I always recommend focusing on what your organization’s real needs are. What are the strategic objectives that the learning/training department is trying to meet? Take a step out of the box and start from the top. What is the core purpose of my initiative? From there, start to imagine an ideal world. How would you create a perfect educational experience? What data would you want to measure and track? What would make your boss giddy with the improvements you facilitated? Craft the ideal world, then go looking for the pieces to make it a reality. Those pieces are going to be different for everybody.

Q: What is the typical data structure of LRS?

It’s too early for anything to be considered “typical” in the Tin Can world and LRS implementations are no different. Some LRSs are using relational data structures whereas others are taking a NoSQL approach.

Q: Is there a core guide for implementing Tin Can for iOS available? – key interest in eLearning apps in objective-C

To learn more about Tin Can from a developer’s perspective, start at http://tincanapi.com/page-developers/. There is also a recorded webinar describing the technical bits of Tin Can available at http://tincanapi.com/webinar. There is an open source objective-C client library available at http://tincanapi.com/resources/. (Note that this is a work in progress that is still being ironed out as the Tin Can spec gets to a finalized v1.0.)

Q: With the growth of the generic LRS how do we address concerns about data security and integrity from both the organisation and individual employee?

Good question. From a specification standpoint, Tin Can includes the ability for the system making the statement to securely sign it. This capability allows LRSs to verify that the asserter of the statement is genuine. The spec also includes authentication mechanisms that allow the LRS to control who may read data from and write data to the LRS. It is up to the LRS to implement a permissions structure that is appropriate for the organization/learner using it.

Q: Do you have a working definition of “non-confidential training data?”

No, nothing beyond the obvious “data that is not confidential”.

Q: What is your thinking about who will provide the Personal Data Locker and how do you see the economics of that working – who will pay over the course of a learner’s life?

I don’t know yet. We’ve given it a lot of thought and are seriously considering doing it ourselves. The problem though is that there isn’t a good business model behind it yet. At this point, it would be a Silicon Valley start-up kind of play where you go get a bunch of VC money, accumulate a lot of data and then figure out a way to make money later on.

Q: Hi, Mike! What are your thoughts about learning through social media and risks of discussions that may leak proprietary / confidential information? Thanks!

I don’t have any new or original thoughts beyond what has been discussed a thousand times before. I don’t think Tin Can changes anything in this regard. If people find social media a valuable outlet for learning they are going to use it. The risks of employees disclosing information is inherent to their possession of confidential information. There are plenty of ways to incorporate social concepts into internal learning environments that don’t run the risk of public disclosure.

Q: SumTotal says they will implement when tin can is finalized. When will that be?

The finalized version 1.0 of the Tin Can API is due to be released on April 26, 2013. I hope to see SumTotal join the list of adopters and look forward to many others joining in now that we have a finalized specification.

The post Rethinking Learning Systems with the Tin Can API: Q&A From the Latest Webinar appeared first on Tin Can API.

In advancing our mission to show what you can do today with Tin Can I bring you our latest experiment, Google Hangouts. This was done partially for fun and partially because we at Rustici Software actually use Hangouts a lot for our real work (and fun).

We have two distant remote employees (Me and Ben) most everyone else is in the office regularly or is close enough that they can show up as needed. With how tight we are as a company, we really like talking face to face about things or to just spend lunch watching Tim give Andy a haircut, which is a form of Tim congratulating Andy on a job well done… Referred to as ‘failure to fail.’ You might say it’s a highly personalized reward system. Either way, we all show up to watch the comedy that ensues.

Point being, in keeping us connected – Hangouts work. It would be nice to know who participated in which Hangout, to see where informal discussions are emerging around challenges and to automate sharing notes of what occurred to those who couldn’t make it.

Being that we’re a bunch of Tin Can nerds (we even track our Ping Pong ladder with Tin Can) it’s only fitting that our hangouts make statements. Shaun came on board a couple months ago, his first task was to get up to speed on Tin Can. He jumped in to the Google developers sandbox and started building. What he came out with is very simple and can be powerful. It’s still in the sandbox as a prototype and not production ready, because it’s an experiment.

What It Does

When a person enters a hangout, a statement is made. The statement includes their Google+ id to identify the actor, the verb attended, and the object is the name of the Hangout. By default the name of the Hangout is Google Hangout. If the name of the hangout is changed, the statements will include the new name. We generate an activity ID for each unique Hangout.

Here’s an example:

{
    "id": "6df4f975-e19b-4341-b73a-83055c3c22cd",
    "actor": {
        "name": "Megan Bowe",
        "account": {
            "homePage": "https://plus.google.com",
            "name": "115938474913396210252"
        },
        "objectType": "Agent"
    },
    "verb": {
        "id": "http://adlnet.gov/expapi/verbs/attended",
        "display": {
            "en-US": "attended"
        }
    },
    "timestamp": "2013-04-15T00:57:04.821Z",
    "stored": "2013-04-15T00:57:06.149Z",
    "authority": {
        "account": {
            "homePage": "http://rlstest.appspot.com/",
            "name": "root"
        },
        "objectType": "Agent"
    },
    "voided": false,
    "object": {
        "id": "https://hangoutsapi.talkgadget.google.com/hangouts/_/4f998b514356d8615916024471187d788fe71460/1365987424817",
        "definition": {
            "name": {
                "en-US": "Marketing Huddle"
            },
            "type": "https://talkgadget.google.com/hangouts"
        },
        "objectType": "Activity"
    }
}

Now we can identify all of the people who participated in a specific Hangout and who joined when. It’s better that statements not include extraneous data that can be derived from the collection of data. Meaning that something like adding an extension to list who else is in the hangout is extra work for no benefit, we can derive that from the collection of statements about the same Hangout. Just because you can cram a bunch of stuff in a statement doesn’t mean you should, right?

That’s it. A quick example of another thing that Tin Can can help with. Get in touch with us if you want to explore this further, ask questions, or share some puns. Andy loves puns.

The post Hangouts and a Haircut appeared first on Tin Can API.

What’s it about?

An LRS-centric world, and introducing the TDS
It’s a deep dive into new uses of Tin Can and how Learning Record Stores are reshaping learning systems. It’s an introduction to the concept of the TDS, which is a brand new idea. You won’t find what a TDS on Google, yet.

Accessibility of Data
Mike will be talking in-depth about the LRS and how it ties multiple systems together for a central reporting location. We talk about this stuff all the time, but he’ll be going much further with it in this webinar.

Sources of Learning Data
We also talk a lot about tracking real-world experiences to determine which learning activities cause desired outcomes. In this webinar, we’ll talk about which activities are the right ones to track and what this new capability really means to you.

The Role of the LMS
What does an LMS do in a Tin Can world? The LMS isn’t going anywhere, but it is changing. We’ll be spending some time discussing this.

Join Mike on Monday, April 15th at 12:00 Eastern time. You can register here.

The post Don’t let the name fool you. appeared first on Tin Can API.

When we were approached by Simpson Spence & Young (SSY), the world’s largest independent shipbroking group, to create a learning tool to help them with their marketing, we knew that our Tin Can API based platform would be perfect.

As ever, we started by getting to know their business and we learnt that much of their work involves arranging derivative contracts for steelmakers, mining companies, carmakers and other manufacturers, to fix the price of their raw materials and shipping well into the future. It turns out that researching the benefits of these derivatives contracts isn’t necessarily a priority for a busy steelmaker, but SSY believe that there is potential for growth in this area and wanted to educate existing and potential clients about the upside.

The myCoracle team got to work and developed a fully-fledged e-learning course in plain English, optimised for mobile tablet and PC and delivered it through a dedicated learning portal at ssy.mycoracle.com. With the learning objectives researched and developed, a content plan came together and we used our copywriting skills to bring the subject to life.

Deploying the course on the myCoracle Learning Line platform means users can record their newly acquired knowledge easily, whist starting to build their digital wallet of other learnings from around the web, and offline. We made use of large parts of the Tin Can API; not just the getting and receiving of statements, but also of the activity state and profile features to record progress through the course. The tracking and reporting systems help the customer, SSY, keep an eye on learner progress and that allows targeted engagement that helps turn leads into customers.

In terms of the statements, at the moment we’re mainly using four verbs: “Experienced” from the browser button, and “Visited”, “Read” and “Understood” to track progress through courses. A user gets the “visited” statement when they visit the page for the first time, “read” if they mark is as “I want to come back to this” and understood if they mark it as “I understand this and want to move on”

Our LRS then uses these statements to provide reports to returning visitors so they can pick up where they left off.

Each course is given a specific Activity Profile so that the LRS knows how long it is, what pages are in it, and optionally, the verbs in generated statements from each page.  Statements within this course make use of the TinCan “context” API to store the relationship between each page and the course.

The LRS generates an Activity State for each user when they visit a course with an Activity Profile, which holds their progress through the course, i.e. which verbs have been generated from which statements for which page.  Actually, we maintain two.  Firstly, for each verb, the list of pages for which the user has issued a statement, and for each page, the list of verbs for which the user has issued statements.

Our reporting is currently done from these pairs of activity states, and some nice CSS!

Plans for the future are to coalesce these individual reports into a bigger usage report to gather metrics to find out the average user journey through the course; to tell our client on average how far through the course people are going, and where the sticking points might be.

Commenting on the project, Duncan Dunn of SSY said:

“As our freight derivatives business has expanded, so we have acknowledged the value of providing education tools to prospective clients. The myCoracle platform is built on the concepts of open, social learning using ‘next generation’ e-learning standards. By offering content to interested learners for free, we have demonstrated that we understand and buy into the value that today’s internet can offer. It’s early days but I’m confident this new platform will play a tangible role in growing our business.”

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Attendees of the 4/4/13 “Tin Can in the Real World” webinar had a few questions that we couldn’t get to “on air”, so I’ve answered them here. There’s some good info in here, even if you couldn’t attend the webinar.

Q. Are there best practices for making information user-specific? When Mike was talking about QR codes, how does the individual’s user-specific data get added from a scanner application?

A. At this early point in Tin Can’s life, I’m reticent to call anything a “best” practice yet. There are plenty of “plausible”, “demonstrated”, “functional” and “promising” practices, but it’s too early to know what is “best” yet.

In this particular use case, I would imagine that there is likely an app on the user’s phone that is preconfigured with the user’s identification. The app would likely have been authenticated against the LRS when it was installed, probably using OAuth.

Alternatively, a standard QR code reader could be used that brings up a web browser. When the user is first redirected to the web page providing the training or assessment, the user could be prompted to login with his/her network access credentials.

Q. Are there TCAPI plug ins for Yammer or Ning?

A. To the best of my knowledge, not yet. These would make great additions however and we’d love to see them. I believe the PulseWeb tool mentioned in the webinar can track Yammer posts, I don’t know the extent of the Tin Can integration directly with Yammer however.

Q. Coming from a large organization with hundreds of courses, multiple LMS’s and a strong dependency on SCORM, what is a natural first step to begin incorporating Tin Can?

A. I’d first want to know what you’re trying to accomplish by moving to Tin Can. Are there specific pain points in your current program that you are trying to alleviate? Are there capabilities you would like to add that the current architecture does not facilitate?

We’re working with a lot of organizations in your shoes. We typically start by looking for pilot projects that alleviate pain or add a new capability. We find one or two things to demonstrate capability which have a lot of visibility and ROI. We’ve developed a methodology for identifying the business problems Tin Can solves and the data we need to collect to show positive improvement.

Organizations often feel that they cannot begin adoption until their LMS vendor starts fully supporting Tin Can. That is often not the case. Remember that Tin Can facilitates migration of data between systems. That means it is easy to stand up an LRS to capture Tin Can data now and then port it into your enterprise LMS when Tin Can support arrives. Give us a call to talk about the possibilities some more, we are helping a lot of organizations get started right now, and whether you ultimately buy something from us or not, we enjoy the conversation.

Q. How is Open Badges by Mozilla compared to the Experience/Tin Can API…? Is this direct competition for users or will the two platforms work together…?

A. I see more possibility for collaboration than I do for competition. Tin Can API can be used in conjunction with Open Badges. You can have certain accomplishments that are recorded by Tin Can, and let you earn badges. There is a demonstration of using Tin Can statement as criteria for earning badges in our Watershed prototype. It doesn’t currently use Open Badges, but it would if it were not just a quick prototype.

Q. This is my first TinCan webinar. So, apologies if this has been answered before. Can we get to see demos (at least some) of these implementations to understand the functionalities better?

A. I’m sure any of these vendors would gladly demonstrate their capabilities for you. There are also a number of live prototypes you can play with at http://tincanapi.com/resources/.

Several of these are hooked into our Watershed prototype personal data locker. You can create an account for free, then interact with the bookmarklet and any of the sample activities and your statements will come back into your Watershed account.

Q. Have Blackboard and others started allowing outside apps to send over data so this data can be used by schools to evaluate data?

A. Blackboard has adopted Tin Can at what we call the “SCORM parity” level so far. Outside apps can send data into the Blackboard LRS to create gradebook entries. Further adoption of Tin Can functionality is still to come.

Q. I got the idea that a vendor can track the use of nearly any kind of material with Tin Can (other than with SCORM). But: If we think of learning, especially in the context of informal learning, is something that “belongs” to the user – how does the user take “his” learning records with him from all the different vendors’ LRSses? Does the user need a LRS of his own if he wants to keep track of all his learnings? Or is this rather out of scope from the perspective of TinCan – you could argue the user might not even know he’s learning at the point where he is reviewing some material…

A. Lots of good questions and points here:

Yes, a vendor or learner can track nearly any kind of material with the Tin Can API. I would even say this includes SCORM content. Our SCORM Engine and Cloud will currently play SCORM content and then report the results as Tin Can statements in an LRS. On the Vanderbilt Medical Center example from the presentation, that is the role of the Training Delivery System (TDS). The TDS is a centralized system for storing and delivering SCORM content that will report back to the LRS via Tin Can.

We do believe that learning records should belong to the learner (with the possible exception of very confidential employer-delivered training). Tin Can provides the technology to make these records very portable across LRSs. We don’t know how this will manifest itself from a business perspective just yet. Our vision is that there is a Personal Data Locker LRS that any learner can store his/her data in. The learner would be responsible for recording informal learning events into the PDL as desired. Our hope is that corporate or educational LRSs would then offer the capability to read from and write to the PDL. The learner would choose a subset of learning records that is public, or readable by select organizations. The corporate LRS would then import these records and make them part of the learner’s overall profile. Similarly, the corporate LRS would contribute a subset of relevant statements to the learner’s PDL.

Q. Is the use of Tin Can API royalty free?

A. Absolutely. The Tin Can API spec is a completely open specification that can be used by anybody. Creation of the spec itself is even following an open source model that anybody can participate in (more info).

Q. May want to relate concept of personal data locker to this ed.gov initiative: http://www.ed.gov/edblogs/technology/mydata/

A. Absolutely. The good thing about having ADL, a government agency, create the Tin Can spec is that they have good contacts in other parts of the government. There is already a lot of dialog between ADL and the Department of Education. We hope to see this dialog continue and I’m excited about the possibilities for Tin Can to positively impact education.

Q. What is storyline doing with the API?

A. Articulate Storyline has included Tin Can as a content publishing option. Content published as Tin Can will be able to utilize their iPad mobile player. My understanding is that the next version of Articulate Studio will likely include support for Tin Can more broadly across products.

Q. We are more interested in functionality and how to apply Tin Can to our own educational platform and website. Can you recommend which webinar we should attend in the future?

A. Our first webinar introduces the concepts and capabilities of Tin Can. The second provides a technical overview of Tin Can. Both are recorded and available at http://tincanapi.com/webinar. From there I would recommend digging into the rest of the tincanapi.com website. We try to publish all of our resources up there and link to other useful resources. If you have a request for a specific webinar in the future or for more information, please let us know. If you have more questions, please feel free to ask us, whether you’re buying something from us or not we’re always happy to answer your questions about SCORM or Tin Can.

Q. What organization maintains the API and is that organization responsible for future enhancements to the API?

A. Rustici Software created the Tin Can API in 2010-2011 as part of a research grant (“Project Tin Can”) from the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative (ADL). ADL is a research lab within the US Department of Defense. ADL is the owner and steward of the Tin Can API (which they officially call the Experience API). ADL is shepherding the development of the Tin Can API through an open working group that anybody can freely participate in. After the specification is developed and mature, ADL plans to hand it over to an open standards group for ongoing sustainment.

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